Kubernetes Pods Are Inheriting Too Many Permissions

The SANS Institute report warns that default Kubernetes behavior allowing pods to inherit node permissions can enable cloud privilege escalation—via SSRF or malicious container images accessing instance metadata—potentially compromising entire clusters; it recommends adopting workload identity and OIDC federation across managed services (EKS, AKS, GKE) to enforce least privilege and reduce attack surface, with findings to be presented at RSAC 2025.